Vietnam War body count controversy

The Vietnam War body count controversy centers on the counting of enemy dead by the US forces during the Vietnam War.

Overview

Since the goal of the United States in the Vietnam War was not to conquer North Vietnam but rather to ensure the survival of the South Vietnamese government, measuring progress was difficult. All the contested territory was theoretically "held" already. Instead, the US Army used body counts to show that the US was winning the war. The Army's theory was that eventually, the Vietcong and North Vietnamese Army would lose after the attrition warfare.

According to historian Christian Appy, "search and destroy was the principal tactic; and the enemy body count was the primary measure of progress" in General Westmoreland’s war of attrition. Search and destroy was coined as a phrase in 1965 to describe missions aimed at flushing the Viet Cong out of hiding, while the body count was the measuring stick for the success of any operation. Competitions were held between units for the highest number of Vietnamese killed in action, or KIAs. Army and marine officers knew that promotions were largely based on confirmed kills. The pressure to produce confirmed kills resulted in massive fraud. One study revealed that 61% of American commanders considered that body counts were grossly exaggerated.[1]

Killing and Counting Unarmed Civilians

The Vietnamese government reported 849,000 military deaths during the war from the periods between 1955 and 1975, of which 1/3 were non-combat deaths,[2][3][4] (it is unclear whether or not this figure includes the 300-330,000 PAVN/VC soldiers missing in the war), while 58,220 Americans and about 313,000 South Vietnamese combatants died [5] in the conflict.[6] The official US Department of Defense figure was 950,765 communist forces killed in Vietnam from 1965 to 1974.[7] Defense Department officials believed that these body count figures need to be deflated by 30 percent. It was estimated that around 220,000 civilians killed by US/ARVN battle operations were miscounted as "enemy KIA".[8] For official US military operations reports, there are no distinctions between enemy KIA and civilian KIA since it was assumed by US forces that an area declared a free-fire zone that all individuals killed regardless of whether they were combatants or civilians were considered enemy KIA.[9][10][11] Since body counts was a direct measure of operational success this often caused US battle reports to list civilians killed as enemy KIA.[12] The inclusion of civilians killed led to the enormous discrepancy between weapons seized and 'enemy KIA' during Operation Speedy Express, nearly 10,000 KIA with just 748 weapons found. Most of the enemy killed included were unarmed civilians.[8] The My Lai Massacre, Thuy Bo massacre and Son Thang massacre had all reported women and children killed as "enemy combatants".

Former Marine Officer and later war-time corresponding Philip Caputo in the book A Rumor of War noted:

General Westmoreland’s strategy of attrition also had an important effect on our behavior. Our mission was not to win terrain or seize positions, but simply to kill: to kill communists and as many of them as possible. Stack ’em like cordwood. Victory was a high body-count, defeat a low kill-ratio, war a matter of arithmetic. The pressure on unit commanders to produce enemy corpses was intense, and they in turn communicated it to their troops. This led to such practices as counting civilians as Viet Cong. ‘If it’s dead and Vietnamese, it’s VC,’ was our rule of thumb in the bush. It is not surprising, therefore, that some men acquired a contempt for human life and predilection for taking it.[13]

Christian Appy in Working Class War documents widespread atrocities committed by US forces, especially towards the latter 'withdrawal' period as well.[14] Accidental or deliberate killings through napalming, artillery and others were reported to have frequently either been re-attributed to the PAVN/VC or claimed as "Viet Cong" casualties by US forces.[14] Other reported incidents include the ambushing or attacking unarmed groups of men such as fishermen or farmers[15] which were reported as "Viet Cong" as well as any civilians wearing black pajamas and civilians running away from helicopters, including women and children who were again reported as "enemy combatants" KIA.[16] One notable example of this was the killing of hundreds of unarmed civilians by Tiger Force, following grievous losses from an NVA ambush, in which the unit proceeded to kill countless women, children, crippled individuals and so-on during Operation Wheeler/Wallowa.[17]

Body Count Inflation

In the summer of 1970, H. Norman Schwarzkopf writes, "the Army War College issued a scathing report," that, among other things, "criticised the Army's obsession with meaningless statistics and was especially damning on the subject of body counts in Vietnam. A young captain had told the investigators a sickening story: he'd been under so much pressure from headquarters to boost his numbers that he'd nearly gotten into a fistfight with a South Vietnamese officer over whose unit would take credit for various enemy body parts. Many officers admitted they had simply inflated their reports to placate headquarters."[18]

The junior officers queried in the 1970 "Study on Military Professionalism" (seemingly the study that Schwarzkopf refers to) had particularly violent reactions to instructions on the body count.[19] "They told of being given quotas and being told to go out and recount until they had sufficient numbers. “Nobody out there believes the body count,” was the reportedly common response."

In Lewis Sorley's book "A Better War", published in 1999 after studies of voluminous previously-secret papers of Creighton Abrams, he writes "Body count may have been the most corrupt - and corrupting - measure of progress in the whole mess. Certainly the consensus of senior Army leaders, the generals who commanded in Vietnam, strongly indicates that it was. A survey found that sixty-one percent of officers believed that the body count was often inflated. Typical comments by the respondents were that it was "a fake - totally worthless," that "the immensity of the false reporting is a blot on the honor of the Army," and that they were grossly exaggerated by many units primarily because of the incredible interest shown by people like McNamara and Westmoreland."[20] Sorley cites Douglas Pike with a figure of 900,000 PAVN/VC dead by 1973 and alleges that during a 1974 visit by Admiral Elmo Zumwalt to North Vietnam, PAVN General Võ Nguyên Giáp advised Zumwalt that the North had 330,000 missing. Jim Webb claims that the Vietnamese lost over 1.1m soldiers.[20]:384 Geoffrey Ward and Ken Burns in the book The Vietnam War states over a million casualties were reported as well.[21]

Secretary of Defense Charles Hagel states that U.S. commanders on the ground inflated body counts since this was how their success was judged."You used that body count, commanding officers did, as the metric and measurement of how successful you were...", hence providing a positive incentive for deliberate fabrication.[22] During the Battle of Dak To and the Battle of the Slopes, one company commander alleges after losing 78 men while finding 10 enemy bodies, the "enemy body count" figures was deliberately re-written as 475 by General William Westmoreland and released as official operational reports.[21]

Shelby Stanton states that accurate assessments of North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong losses were largely impossible due to lack of corresponding statistics, the fact that allied ground units were often unable to confirm artillery and aerial kills and gamesmanship practised by units under pressure to "produce results." American losses were subject to statistical manipulation as well. For instance, dying soldiers put aboard medical evacuation helicopters were often counted as only wounded in unit after-action tables."[23]

Author Mark Woodruff states that when the Vietnamese Government released its actual losses in April 1995 as being 1.1 million dead, US body count figures he claimed they had actually underestimated communist losses.[24]

References

  1. ↑ "In This War, Body Count Is Ruled Out : Casualties: Gen. Schwarzkopf makes it clear he's not repeating a blunder made in Vietnam". latimes. Retrieved 2018-07-06.
  2. ↑ "CÔNG TÁC TÌM KIẾM, QUY TẬP HÀI CỐT LIỆT SĨ TỪ NAY ĐẾN NĂM 2020 VÀ NHỮNG NĂM TIẾP THEO, Bộ Quốc phòng Việt Nam".
  3. ↑ "Công tác tìm kiếm, quy tập hài cốt liệt sĩ từ nay đến năm 2020 và những năn tiếp theo". Ministry of National Defense - Government of Vietnam.
  4. ↑ NAM, ĐẢNG CỘNG SẢN VIỆT. "Đời đời nhớ ơn các anh hùng liệt sĩ!". dangcongsan.vn (in Vietnamese). Retrieved 2018-06-11.
  5. ↑ "Image: SOD.TAB6.1A.GIF, (899 × 5509 px)". hawaii.edu. Retrieved 2018-06-28.
  6. ↑ Thayer, Thomas C (1985). War Without Fronts: The American Experience in Vietnam. Boulder: Westview Press. p.106.
  7. ↑ Lewy, Guenter (1978). America in Vietnam. Oxford University Press. pp. 450–1. ISBN 9780199874231.
  8. 1 2 Bellamy, Alex J. (2017-09-29). East Asia's Other Miracle: Explaining the Decline of Mass Atrocities. Oxford University Press. pp. 33–34. ISBN 9780191083785.
  9. ↑ "Free Fire Zone - The Vietnam War".
  10. ↑ "Declassification of the BDM Study, "The Strategic Lessons Learned in Vietnam"" (PDF). Defense Technical Center. pp. 225–234.
  11. ↑ Appy, Christian (1993). Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam. http://projectsmrj.pbworks.com/f/Working+Class+War+-+Christian+Appy.pdf: UNC Chapel Hill. p. 273.
  12. ↑ "Body Count in Vietnam | HistoryNet". www.historynet.com. Retrieved 2018-06-04.
  13. ↑ O'Nan, Stewart; Caputo, Philip (1998). The Vietnam Reader: The Definitive Collection of American Fiction and Nonfiction on the War. Anchor Books. p. 156. ISBN 9780385491181.
  14. 1 2 G.,, Appy, Christian. Working-class war : American combat soldiers and Vietnam (PDF). Chapel Hill. pp. 267–278. ISBN 0807820571. OCLC 25915762.
  15. ↑ Kwon, Heonik; Kwŏn, Hŏn-ik (2006). After the Massacre: Commemoration and Consolation in Ha My and My Lai. University of California Press. ISBN 9780520247963.
  16. ↑ Turse, Nick (2013-01-15). Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam. Henry Holt and Company. pp. 121–128. ISBN 9780805095470.
  17. ↑ Ward, Geoffrey C.; Burns, Ken (2017-09-05). The Vietnam War: An Intimate History. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. pp. 235–238. ISBN 9781524733100.
  18. ↑ Schwarzkopf/Petre, "It Doesn't Take A Hero," Bantam Books, 1992, 204.
  19. ↑ "The On-Going Battle for the Soul of the Army | Small Wars Journal". smallwarsjournal.com. Retrieved 2018-05-31.
  20. 1 2 Sorley, Lewis (2007). A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam. Harvest. pp. 21–2. ISBN 9780156013093.
  21. 1 2 Ward, Geoffrey C. (2017). The Vietnam War: An Intimate History. Alfred A. Knopf. p. 193. ISBN 9780307700254.
  22. ↑ Patricia Sullivan (5 August 2009). "A Vietnam War That Never Ends". Retrieved 2011-08-17.
  23. ↑ Stanton, Shelby L. (2003). The Rise and Fall of an American Army. Random House Publishing Group. pp. xvi–xvii. ISBN 9780891418276.
  24. ↑ Woodruff, Mark (1999). Unheralded Victory: Who won the Vietnam war?. Harper Collins. p. 211. ISBN 0004725190.
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